4.21pm – From Twitter: Lots of people in media and marketing do team bonding but the folks from Buzzfeed Australia are taking it to a new level.

Is it just us or does guy third from the left look less excited than the rest of his team?

3.27pm – Sky News is back on air after being hit by gremlins. During a cross from the Sydney studio to Melbourne, the sound disappeared, before the image froze too. While engineers presumably battled to fix the problem, the news network faded to a lengthy ad break, a prerecorded showbiz package, then more ads and station promos. Ashley Gillon then reappeared from what seemed to be a different studio, telling viewers: “We apologise for those recent technical difficulties. Rest assured we’re now back up and running.”

2.57pm – Surfer Otis Carey is suing News Corp subsidiary Nationwide News for defamation over remarks which appeared in the Daily Telegraph. Full story here.

1.37pm – In the wake of Mi9 boss Mark Britt’s departure yesterday one of the questions being asked is who will chair the IAB. It looks like it might be Yahoo!7’s Ed Harrison. Read the full story here.

1.32pm – According to a new survey by IPSOS Google is the most influential brand in Australia, with its ability to alter how people “shop, think, act and behave” placing it ahead of other companies. Full story here.

1.06pm – Here’s a interesting campaign for the Australian Physiotherapy Association (APA) targeting tradies in a new campaign encouraging them to be more away of their health and safety at work. The campaign is fronted by comedian Dave Hughes and a tagline “shit tradies never say”, check out the video below or read the story here.

Youtube: Last Week Tonight host John Oliver gave his take on native advertising, and how it is affecting the media in America.

Print is still where most original journalism is done, but since papers moved online they have struggled financially, mainly because news is like porn. People don’t want to pay for it on the internet even though somewhere in a dimly lit room Paul Krugman worked very hard to make it.

“Online print publications have struggled to attract advertisers mainly because banner ads are so ineffective we only intentionally click on them less than 2/10ths of one per cent of the time, which actually sounds about right, because did you know that if you click on a banner ad you literally get taken to a page which reads ‘Hey, is everything OK? I’m presuming you passed out and hit your head on the keyboard. I’m calling an ambulance right now.'”

Xiaxue, real name Wendy Cheng, wrote a scathing review about a treatment from get-thin firm Slim Couture, which involves the use the traditional Chinese method of “cupping” the skin to lose weight.

Soon after she posted the article in which she criticised the treatment for being ineffective in reducing her weight, being painful and and giving her bruises, she deleted it, saying that she didn’t want to get Nuffnang – who manages the endorsements for her blog – into trouble.

“Rupert Murdoch tends to finish what he starts. So from the moment the news broke last month that Time Warner Inc. had rejected an $80 billion bid by Mr. Murdoch’s 21st Century Fox, the assumption on Wall Street and in the media world was that it was only a matter of time before a deal was struck.

Since then, though, Time Warner has made it clear that it views Fox’s approach as a hostile takeover, and it has refused to negotiate with Fox.”

Alex Hayes worked for Mumbrella from 2013 to 2017 in roles including editor and head of Mumbrella Bespoke.
He has been a journalist for more than a decade working on newspapers and websites in the UK and Australia, specialising in the media and marketing sector since 2012.